3D World

Günter Nikodim

The work of this freelance artist tests Cinema 4D’s VFX tools – and that of its new Radeon™ Prorender render engine – to their limits

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Few people push Cinema 4D harder than Günter Nikodim. Over the past five years, the freelance CG artist has worked on a series of ambitious visual effects sequences for Austrian movies and TV series, ranging from simulating floods and landslides to recreating the city of Vienna in 3D.

“Cinema 4D is the perfect tool for smaller businesses,” says Nikodim. “In most jobs, my highest priority is to deliver things quickly. Cinema 4D has a very streamline­d workflow, and good connection­s to compositin­g software like Nuke.”

That makes Cinema 4D ideal for Cybertime, the boutique VFX house with which Nikodim often works. For the memorably titled 2013 movie Bad Fucking – named after a village in Austria, and actually pronounced ‘fooking’ – the studio simulated both a landslide and a tidal wave carrying a shoal of 3,000 eels, with Nikodim using Cinema 4D for all the dynamics work.

For 2016 TV mini-series Das Sacher: In Bester Gesellscha­ft, set around Vienna’s famous Hotel Sacher, Nikodim and four other artists turned around 200 VFX shots in two months, including a full CG sequence showing the city of Vienna in the background: again created entirely in Cinema 4D.

Besides Cinema 4D, Nikodim uses few other tools in production: Nuke and After Effects for compositin­g, and Realflow for fluid simulation. Although Cybertime used to use Syntheyes for 3D tracking, that role has now largely been taken over by Cinema 4D’s own built-in motion tracker.

“It’s a big advantage that these toolsets are integrated,” says Nikodim. “Cinema 4D is easy to use, but you can work procedural­ly, and the character rigging tools are great.”

In production, Nikodim still uses an old tower Mac Pro®, albeit one with a 12-core CPU, AMD'S ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 GPU, and up to 64GB of RAM.

“I only add something to my toolset if I really need it,” he explains. “It only matters that it works for the job, and that it runs stably and reliably.”

Recently, Nikodim has been pushing the stability of Radeon Prorender, AMD’S physically correct GPU renderer, to its limits. In his work as a beta tester, he trialled the new Radeon Prorender features in Cinema 4D R20 on his own personal test scene: a production-quality model of a T. rex.

Again, the asset was modelled, painted, rigged and animated entirely in Cinema 4D: Nikodim originally created it to test the sculpting tools in Cinema 4D R14 and has been updating it steadily ever since.

Of those new options available in Radeon Prorender in R20, Nikodim singles out motion blur – “a great addition, because it makes [the renderer] suitable for any kind of animation” – subsurface scattering, and multi-pass rendering.

“In my day-to-day work, I use multi-pass rendering a lot,” he says. “It’s amazing that we have it in Radeon Prorender now.”

Even on Nikodim’s home computer – a standard games machine with a quad-core CPU, consumer GPU and 16GB of RAM – render times were low, with a full HD walk animation clocking in at just 10 minutes per frame.

Nikodim also praises the speed with which a scene can be set up for rendering. “The beauty of a GPU renderer like Radeon Prorender is that you have beautiful lighting immediatel­y,” he says. “I could just change the HDRI file to experiment with how the model would look in different environmen­ts. You get a first impression extremely quickly.”

“Cinema 4D is the perfect tool for smaller studios”

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 ??  ?? Main image: Günter Nikodim created this T. rex entirely in Cinema 4D, recently using it to test the new features in the built-in Radeon Prorender rendererth­is page: Stills from the memorably titled Austrian movie Bad Fucking (above) and TV series Das Sacher: In Bester Gesellscha­ft (left). Key elements of the visual effects were created in Cinema 4D
Main image: Günter Nikodim created this T. rex entirely in Cinema 4D, recently using it to test the new features in the built-in Radeon Prorender rendererth­is page: Stills from the memorably titled Austrian movie Bad Fucking (above) and TV series Das Sacher: In Bester Gesellscha­ft (left). Key elements of the visual effects were created in Cinema 4D
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